You know how when you first got into underground metal, your parents and friends were like, “All these bands singing about Satan, they’re just doing it for the money, you know?”

They were wrong, then. Now, they are half-right. These bands are not doing it for the money, but the labels, blogs, promoters, and streaming services certainly are in cahoots and serving you up some truly mediocre garbage.

At this point, the people getting fleeced are the bands. The fans pay virtually nothing; they stream via services that pay out fractions of cents to any band. The labels make money by having anything to stream.

But the bands, they pay. Forty bucks a month for a promotion company. Pay-to-play at clubs and blogs. The label makes them pay for their own recording. The practice space for $300 a month.

The metal economy is entirely a fake, based upon assumptions from the mid-to-late 1990s that are no longer real. You are being conned, but the bands are even more conned, by the perception of an audience that is not there.

Seriously, new bands get what, two hundred listens on a new track or whole album release? That goes up to a couple thousand when the promoters ask their friends to tune in, but still… these numbers are nonsense.

Back in the 1990s, when America was under two hundred million people and the majority were above 98 IQ points, having five thousand people buy a release was huge, but if a thousand bought it, ten thousand listened.

Now there is a neverending flood of new music that all sounds the same, has biographical quirks to make each band stand out, but is basically pure aesthetics and not any kind of purpose. It is equal, all right. Equally empty.

Metal is in heat-death, and while it has been heading this way for some time, it has finally hit that point. These releases are fungible, which is why people listen to them on streaming. They are distractions, not enjoyments.

The few people who hang around metal are poseurs pretending to like one boring release over another because it gives them street (suburb) cred. None of these releases are good at all; they are mediocre, but no one can tell anymore!

We are in exactly the place hardcore music hit after a few years of intensity. Everyone had to have “their” share, so everyone made a hardcore record, and because people were imitating aesthetics and not ideas, they all sounded the same.

Sure, you can add a piccolo or weird vocals, but it does not make a difference in the long term. Your band is still mediocre and musically similar to everything else because you have no artistic ideas and are just emulating the aesthetics of the past.

When aesthetics rules — that is akin to effect in cause-effect, or means in means-over-ends — you get music that is imitating the past and trying to spice it up, all by changing surface appearance.

Contrary to what you believe, music is not how it sounds, but the shapes it forms in your consciousness and how those tell a metaphorical story about life. The sound is the surface, but the music is the structure and patterning.

Naturally, the offends every mediocre person on Earth, most of whom believe that their mall-grade riffs will somehow become magic with the right production, vocals, catchy rhythm, or label support.

All labels in fact believe this. It helps them see their product as an assembly line: take in raw materials (demos), shape with styles and production, then put out a finished product which is worth lotsa money.

Except… this is not working. It may have never worked. Metal has become a jobs program for label stooges, hipsters, carnies, bean-counters, yes-men, eggheads, and failed liberal arts graduates.

They mimic the aesthetics, revive the old conventions, and inject “unique” stuff, but like conservatives or any System, really, they are imitating means not ends, and so nothing holds together. These are songs about nothing.

That is the problem with systems: once you set up a procedure and a checklist, you have a System, and people will do it without regard to whether it is achieving its aims.

Forget the “the only constant is change” blather and all the talk about people “progressing,” because both are nonsense, but focus on this: the task is no longer achieving a goal, but going through a liturgy or methodology.

You can see the same problem in jobs. If your job is to file the TPS reports, you do that whether they are gibberish or not, and if they are doing nothing for the business or humanity, you do it anyway. It’s your job after all.

Black metal has become a job. It has become a System. It has become conservatives flogging on about the Church, abortion, Flag, and property rights while voting for Keynesian entitlements and surveillance states.

Methods are not goals. Only goals determine if what you are doing is consistent as a whole and if it achieves any kind of excellence, beauty, realism, or gradual improvement.

When we talk about commercialization in music, we are speaking of the same thing… music made to fit the expectations of the audience offers them nothing new, but it sells more copies because it is easier to understand.

In human history, our sole problem has been Crowdism, or the tendency of groups to pursue what is popular, which are things that deny the requirements of reality and instead embrace symbols, icons, feelings, or idols.

For this reason, it is not uncommon to find a population in the grips of a famine dedicating its time to sacrifices to gods, ideological purity, drum circles, or redistributing wealth. We cannot fix reality, so we change what we can.

What is commercial is based in popularity, itself a distraction from reality, not re-engagement like art is: art takes the scary sides of life and intertwines them with the beauties, so we see one produces the other.

All the “change is the only constant” people hate the idea that life is cyclic more than oriented toward infinite, linear, and unconstrained “change.” These cycles involve the mutual interplay of destruction and creation.

Those who pursue the transcendent are looking for this frame of thinking where the result of the darkness and light sustaining each other, like natural selection or mental clarity, is more important than our fear of the darkness.

Our ancient ancestors understood that finding the beauty in darkness, more than human judgments about it and emotions shared with a popularity group, determined the strength of our spirit. Survival has purpose.

As Lilou & John opine on their latest album:

Vígríðr is the field where Ragnarök’s final battle shall take place. It is there that Óðinn, Þórr, Lóki, Fenrir and Jörmungandr all shall die the day the world tree burns to ash.

Nietzsche knew well the mentality that rules in this final clash between gods and giants. In the battle lay the meaning of existence—the same insight that Heraclitus formulated more than two thousand years earlier: the world is created from conflict.

When we started our indie band in 2016, we were driven by the conflict between order and chaos—the ancient rhythm’s beauty and the moment’s flashing intensity. Life is a struggle between opposites.

Album after album, we explored the world from this starting point: change and flow drive time—nostalgia and utopia are the blind man’s way of trying to see. We switched styles, instruments, themes, and tones—but never our viewpoint.

With time, we understood—just as Nietzsche did—that culture was our antithesis: a collective drive toward the simplest theses, regardless of cultural belonging. The ideological superstructure’s foundational texts—from the Bible to Capital and The Communist Manifesto—all presented the same simple division into wish-dream and nightmare. Nowhere was the authentic awareness of existence: the ego as the psyche’s gravity, the primal force from which nothing can escape.

On the album Black River Butcher, we plunged into Nietzsche’s, Heraclitus’s, and Charles Bukowski’s poetic excesses—among serial killers and rapists, we found a description of man’s destructiveness and one ego’s inevitable struggle against another ego. We also found death as existential collapse, the terror that drives modern man into short-term pleasures in flight from the fear of his own dissolution.

But our Nietzschean rage and Heraclitus’s thundering rapids demanded that we go even deeper.

The next step became Stríð—and it is there we brought the spiritual combat that marks all our music.

The album is a tribute to the Old Norse culture—perhaps the most human of them all—and its eternally inherent contradictions between choice and fate, life and death, order and chaos. A religion where nothing is permanent and where concepts like goodness and evil are meaningless, empty casings from rifles fired at the stars.

Stríð consists of sixteen poems set to pulsating drums and a voice that hacks into the soul with its mindless refusal to yield. It is a portrayal of the myth of Ragnarök, from Óðinn’s binding of Fenrir to the fate-laden silence on the battlefield when Niðhögg’s glowing wings rise over Niðafjöll’s dark mountains.

In a time when people flee from themselves, from their own experienced existence as water drops on a window, it is more important than ever to reconnect to one’s origin. On Vígríðr’s vast field—where ice and fire shall be annihilated and born anew—all answers exist.

The struggle—not the victory, for death seizes the all-father’s neck with its mighty jaw—is in itself the meaning of life. All beyond it is slave morality’s cloying voice that seeks to make us accept our fate as victims of “the good.”

In the struggle between Óðinn and Fenrir lies an even deeper insight. Óðinn sacrifices himself—but always to his ego: “I sacrificed myself to myself.”

The meaningful sacrifice is that which is made to gain insight. At the final battle, he nevertheless meets the one stronger than him—the glorious wolf Hróðvitnir, Vánagandr, Fenrisúlfr.

Óðinn’s sacrifices were meaningless, says the one who lazily scrolls on TikTok. No. His sacrifices—both the hanging in Yggdrasil (where he became Fimbulþulr), and the offering of his eye (where he became Einöygdr)—were profoundly meaningful. Herein lies the deepest truth of all:

The selfish sacrifice transforms us to merge with our own will to power—which in turn leads us to embrace the struggle as the principle of life.

Stríð leads us against culture, forward to ourselves.

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Nedgravd – Ascension: these guys love Infester, but are like most bands, watching a museum diorama of underground metal and trying to imitate what it had, without what holds it together, which is an artistic vision of alienation from overgrown humanity and a desire for pure structuralist logic (death metal) or Romanticist natural selection (black metal) that cannot be distilled to a formula of riffs, only the transcendental mystery of how they interact to tell a story of evolving awareness in the face of obvious but denied events.

Fimbul Winter – “Crowned in Ash”: death metal played with the sentimental appeal of power metal and melancholic pop like Joy Division or the Misfits, this indulgent track gets rid of some of the more ridiculous aspects of “melodic death metal” (really: ATG/Dissection fan-bands) by stripping the music down to present itself with power, but with too much emphasis on vocals/lyrics, this has minimal repeat listening potential. Deport.

Monolord – “It’s Neverending”: surely you wanted to hear Red Fang covering King Crimson with a Britpop twist, but if not, that is what you will get, but it has zero relevance to metal.

Ana – Motivated By Death: female-fronted BritPop mixed with emo and gospel, this album full of swelling choruses and noisy verse riffs is not functionally distinct from a Joydrop album.

Midnight Odyssey – A Mass of Fallen Stars – Live in Toulon: this is basically synthpop without the good hooks and a trudging industrial rhythm while some diva blurts out black metal vocals at indie rock pace; basically, if you loved The Smashing Pumpkins but wanted edgier, you are going to love this until you wake up and realize it is samey and boring.

Junon – The Golden Citadel Of The Astral Sphere: label guys think it is a strong beneficial trait to say “hey these guys have been inb ands for twenty years” because label guys are all ex-hipsters, but what you should read this is that these guys never produced anything of interest and are desperate for some claim to fame so they get half-price IPAs as the local HITW brewpub, and this droning garbage should show you why that is a bad plan.

Lorn – Searing Blood: this is just emo with extra steps. It pretends to be black metal, but like the “Italian-flavored” sauce, is the product of rote formula.

Domjord – Morgonglöd: if you really liked Wardruna and other ritual stuff, this might appeal with its electro-acoustic manipulation and industrial beats in a tribal ritual context, but really, it is not designed for listening; it is designed for you to put it on for friends and explain it and why it is important, which is different from actually enjoying it for having made its weird attributes into cool music.

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Consider that music captures consciousness and therefore, animates life with its own narrative:

More than half of the students (54%) reported regularly listening to music when reading for study, while 46% preferred silence.

Among those who listened to music, almost all believed it helped their reading.

Students described using music to boost motivation, enhance focus, or block out external noise, with Classical and Rock emerging as the most common genres. Many preferred non-lyrical, slow music to support concentration.

Underground metal aimed for semi-lyrical, meaning that the words are not discernible, and instead of slow, created pulsing ambient waves of sound that move more like the wind or a running jaguar than the usual happy upbeat rock.

Music feeds the mind in other ways, including concentration:

The findings revealed consistent advantages for musically trained individuals across nearly every measure tested. Regardless of their age, musicians responded roughly 36 milliseconds faster on average than their non-musician counterparts—a small but reliable difference that held across the entire age range studied. They were also less prone to lapses in attention—often described as “zoning out”—and showed more stable response times on tasks designed to assess sustained vigilance.

Maybe bashing out those old Deicide covers has actually made you more intense, or at least, more able to notice intensity and remember it. Maybe this is why music featured so heavily in ritual; people retained more of it.

Speaking of ritual, the ancient touched the modern as King Charles reached out to Sharon Osbourne after the passing of Ozzy:

“He [Charles] knew Ozzy. He knew we met him several times, and he’s always been so gracious with Ozzy, and they would always laugh together… He got Ozzy. He got him,” she told Piers Morgan’s Uncensored.

The King was not the only head of state to send their tributes, with US President Donald Trump also leaving the family a voice message.

Battling the tears, Sharon continued: “When you look at King Charles, and you look at Donald Trump, whatever anybody might think about them, it’s their business, but their days, you know, how full their day is?”

It is unclear whether this influenced her decision to attend the Unite the Kingdom rally:

Sharon Osbourne has announced her intention to attend the Unite the Kingdom demonstration scheduled for May 16 in London.

The television personality, 73, publicly declared her support beneath a social media clip posted by Tommy Robinson, writing: “See you at the march.”

The rally will take place at Trafalgar Square, with Mr Robinson stating in his promotional video the date marks when “Britain rises and reunites” against mass immigration and government tyranny.

Guess black metal was not that far off the mark, then. The day it embraces the Kings and adualistic, Platonic spirituality we might be getting somewhere, since all the third world stuff like Christianity is just Arabic gibberish.

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Tags: concentration, king charles, metal theory, sharon osbourne, smr, tommy robinson